Tag: Mama’s Family

With International Women’s Day having just passed, and it being National Women’s History Month, I realized I could do more to spotlight the representation of women’s wrestling (both good and bad) in pop culture. And wouldn’t you know it, there’s enough TV episodes featuring women wrestling to make a top ten list. These are the best ones.

Medium: TelevisionTitle:Mama’s Family Bio: The Masked Mabels were once the most dominant tag team in the women’s wrestling division. Despite their size and years of wrestling experience, they were easily defeated by a wrestling grannie on the biggest show in the history of Raytown.Signature Move: Jobbing to an older lady who has never wrestled.

While Mama’s Family will never make any top ten sitcom lists, or be revered for breaking any ground as a sitcom or, hell, for being an entertaining sitcom for that matter, it was still a sitcom I regularly watched as a kid. Which will tell you that I spent most of my childhood without cable TV. Upholding the long-standing tradition of working class/white trash family sitcoms, Mama’s Family also happened to have a wrestling episode that involved Harper matriarch, Thelma, and daughter-in-law Naomi competing inside the ring. The show also decided to go the much more realistic route of having their TV characters, that have never wrestled before, win their matches against seasoned pros. And yet, we still wonder why the WWE books celebrities the way they do.

Ah, The Bundys. They changed the landscape of prime-time sitcoms, with their uncouth, unabashed, unapologetic style and made an everlasting joke out of shoe salesmen the world over. And they put the Fox network on the map. So, there’s that. In this particular episode, a Bundy once again finds himself forced to wrestle. Only instead of a big lady wrestler, it’s a fat male wrestler.